farmville

We Rule is a real-time kingdom simulation game where you'll need to earn money to expand your kingdom. Earning money in We Rule requires that you grow crops and build factories and shops that will bring in a steady income over time. The touch-screen interface is fairly intuitive for choosing what type of objects you want to build, but lacks descriptions of buildings making it difficult to predict how much income you will gain by placing a specific type of building. Part of the fun is finding out which building will net you the most cash. You also can … Read more

Being the 800-pound gorilla in the social games room, it's no surprise that there are a lot of gripes about Farmville publisher Zynga.

Usually, people inside an industry with strong feelings about a specific company keep those sentiments to themselves because they don't want to burn bridges. So what might surprise some is how easy it is to find games industry professionals with an ax to grind about Zynga. Those tend to have to do with issues ranging from the company's propensity to imitate others' game concepts to a perception that it is both insensitive to the … Read more

Though it might seem otherwise just now, there's more to life than college basketball. Oh, who am I kidding? No, there's not. But you need something to keep you busy during those endless Southwest Airlines commercials, right?

With that in mind, here's this week's batch of new games for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and, soon enough, iPad.

1. Fisher-Price games Not all games are for grown-ups. Fisher-Price's App Store debut includes three titles for the toddler set: Chatter Telephone (99 cents), Little People Farm ($1.99), and See 'n Say ($1.99). I must admit I have mixed feelings about substituting an electronic screen for actual tactile toys--but if these apps can buy you a five-minute break from screaming, then I say, let 'em tap!

2. Frogman Look! Crossing the street! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's...Frogman! This Frogger-inspired, superhero-themed slice of 3D awesomeness isn't in the App Store just yet, but it's due "very soon"--and when you get a peek at the promo video, you'll understand why I can't wait. Kinda makes the original Frogger look like, well, roadkill.… Read more

With the 2010 edition of the Game Developers Conference winding down, we've put together a short photographic tour of our week, from Sony's PlayStation Move launch to the booth-filled expo hall. Though surprises were few and far between, we did pick up on some new lines of perceived wisdom from our fellow attendees in the form of trends and themes to watch out for.

Indie games looking for bigger audiencesOne highlight of the week was the Independent Games Festival Awards, which celebrated small, indie projects. Many of these games are or will be available as iPhone, Xbox Live, or PC downloadable games, and though we thought there were too many side-scrolling platform games, there were also many very creative ideas on display.

The move toward digital distribution is having the same effect on the video game industry as it did on the music industry several years ago. Small, independent developers, with tiny budgets and teams, can bypass publishing middlemen and sell directly to the consumer (or close to directly--the owners of much of this virtual retail shelf space, including Apple and Microsoft, still act as gatekeepers).

If you want to check out a few of these indie games, Monaco, a four-player co-op game, took top honors at the awards show.  We also liked the photographic mystery game Trauma and the atmospheric side-scroller Limbo. (Disclosure: My spouse, AOL Games Editor in Chief Libe Goad, is a member of the IGF judges panel.) … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For game developers whose industry experience predates not just Facebook but even Mark Zuckerberg, you might expect that abandoning making big, complex games for simple titles like Farmville and similar social projects would be anathema.

But to hear a panel of respected industry veterans who spoke before a packed house in a huge room at the Game Developers Conference here Tuesday, the truth is exactly the opposite. In fact, to these four speakers at least, this may be the opporunity of a lifetime--making a transition from working on $25 million console-level games that take years to build to small … Read more

Almost every week for the last few years, it seems, I've gotten a press release or a pitch touting some company's great new Facebook games network or kids' virtual world.

And why not? Companies like Zynga and Playfish are making money hand over fist with their collections of massively popular social games, and 2D Flash games aimed at children like Club Penguin, Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, and others have garnered vast amounts of virtual world investment dollars in recent years.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

To find the answer, one has only to do what investigative journalists were always trained to do: follow the money. But while Facebook games like FarmVille and Who Has the Biggest Brain, and social worlds for kids or teens like Gaia Online make financial sense, they aren't all that satisfying intellectually.

After all, while Second Life had no end of technical problems and was about as inviting to mainstream audiences as obscure European philosophy, it had a complex economy, a deep social structure, sophisticated politics and always seemed, to me, at least, as the jumping off point for truly groundbreaking technology.… Read more

Monday, we wrote about how the HTC Desire's ROM had been hacked into a Nexus One. Aside from Sense UI, one of the added features was Adobe Flash 10.1, which works in the browser to enable Flash content such as videos and games.

Taimur Asad from technology site Redmond Pie shot a video showing the popular Facebook game FarmVille running on the Android smartphone. It appeared to load smoothly, though by his own admission, Asad wasn't quite clued in as to how the game works, which made the demo quite a drag to watch.

If games such … Read more

We received a passionate e-mail from one of our listeners about the show's constant feminist slant. Fortunately for Nicholas, we quickly decided to devote an entire episode to the other side (for a change).

E-mail that inspired today’s episode: The “enough with the feminism” episode Enough with the feminist ranting! I want to hear smart woman discuss technology. Not feel uncomfortable as they take every dubious marketing idea personally. Why if I took every male marketing idea personally, I’d … Read more

Zynga, the social-gaming developer behind the wildly popular Facebook game FarmVille, announced on Thursday that it has launched a new game for the social network, this one called PetVille. The news was originally reported on the Games.com blog.

According to the company, PetVille allows Facebook users to "raise, dress, and care for a pet" that they've created. Gamers can also visit friends' in-game houses and "play with their pets to earn coins you can use to make your own house the coolest on the block!"

Although PetVille's userbase pales in comparison to Zynga'… Read more